On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 11:35:32AM -0300, Pedro wrote: > On Thursday 12 April 2007 08:25, Theodore Tso wrote: > > likely going to be in deep trouble anyway. Even if you disable the > > OOM killer, now random malloc()'s will start returning NULL because > > your system doesn't have enough memory. Do you have intelligent error > > handling and recovery mechanisms for every single malloc() failure? > > When malloc return NULL, the process may tell the user ENOMEM. > When OOM kill the process, the user claim the program sometimes die.
Then use overcommit=2. The default overcommit mode is a convenience provided to allow poorly designed applications run even when they pretend they need gigs of RAM when they only use a few tens of megs. If your application correctly handles malloc(), simply switch overcommit to 2 and let the system refuse to allocate memory when none is available, then your application will be aware of this by the NULL result to malloc() calls. It is a normal behaviour. I do have appliances which run perfectly controlled software with overcommit_mode=2 and overcommit_ratio around 70% and without any swap, and they work like a charm. It just requires some finer grained tuning on your side. I don't see what the problem is here. You know the app, you know how much RAM you want to allocate to it, you know how much you want to keep free. Then say this to the system. BTW, ulimit -v is your friend here too, and does not require to be root. Regards, Willy - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
